


what's new, pussycat?

by phae



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Clint Barton-centric, Deaf Clint Barton, Kittens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 11:51:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7169888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phae/pseuds/phae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint + a kitten (+ Lucky) = the usual disaster. Clint's poor face'll never be the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what's new, pussycat?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uofmdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uofmdragon/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: Clint Barton - five times the kitten woke him up.

-1-

 

It’s more that Clint comes to than wakes up, the hazy blur lurking around the edges of his vision holding fast even as he blinks against the harsh sunlight doing it’s best to impale his eyes. He’s still got his hearing aids in, but everything’s coming in as a dull kind of roar, which either means he managed to damage them (again) or he hit his head harder than he thought.

 

He picks up on his surroundings then more by smell than anything else–that delightful whiff of food gone bad and diapers turned rancid clueing him in to the fact that he’s landed himself in another dump truck. Could be worse. At least it’s all housed in garbage bags this time. Well, Clint’s assuming the black and white blobs surrounding him are garbage bags. There’s not a lot of definition to those things to begin with, so he’s have a hard time getting a good look at anything.

 

The garbled sounds around him gradually start to separate into at least distinct pitches, one in particular grating on his frazzled nerves. It’s constant and high, like the incessant beeping of an alarm clock, and really, it’d be just his luck to land on one someone thought was broken and tossed, only for his sad ass to smack it back to life.

 

Groping around blindly, Clint starts whacking at the bags around him–flimsy plastic, so definitely garbage bags then–in search of the source, when his hand abruptly encounters something decidedly not plastic.

 

It’s fur. Loud, screeching fur.

 

Jerking up–and talk about ow, he’s gonna have a nasty bump on the back of his head in a couple hours–Clint leans over so he can see better, and sure enough, there’s a mangy little kitten caught between the bags, mewling pathetically. The poor thing’s scared out of it’s wits and starts clawing at Clint’s hand when he reaches out to pull it free, but he can’t even really feel it. Lifting up the hem of his shirt, he makes a little pocket to cradle the kitten.

 

This’d actually make for a pretty great tweet, Clint reckons. Selfie with a kitten and a suitably sappy hashtag. He’s banking on # _sadtrashbabies_.

 

Now where’d his phone fall?

 

-2-

 

Clint wakes up shrieking, frantically batting at the claws mauling his face. He reaches for the gun stashed between the mattress and the bed frame out of habit before he remembers his aids, but those few seconds are enough for the adrenaline spike to wake him up enough that his memory kicks back in.

 

Because of course he brought the kitten home, and of course she's an absolute menace. Waking up to a face full of sharp little kitty nails isn't exactly a surprise. It is, in fact, the exact reason he's been referring to her as Ferocious Attack Cat since his awesome selfie idea turned into a horror story. He still tweeted the results. His twitter fans were about as sympathetic of his injuries as Lucky; that is, not at all sympathetic. Thus is his life.

 

F.A.C.'s now hissing at him from the cover of a comforter mound, back arched up and ears pressed back flat on her head, but it's not Clint she's hissing at. Clint fumbles for the switch to flick the lamp next to his bed on, ‘cause even with all the light pollution in the city, it still leads to a lot of sinister shadows.

 

Let there be light, and what do you know? Lucky’s found his way home. Though Clint’s like, at least 80% sure he dead-bolted the door. Luck’s got his head propped up on the end of the bed, tongue lolling out as his eyes dart back and forth from Clint to F.A.C.

 

Moving slowly, Clint picks up F.A.C., comforter and all, and pulls her close. “It’s okay, jellybean,” Clint soothes. “It’s just Lucky. He’s cool. Right, Luck?” He sees Lucky bark, feels the kitten get impossibly more tense in his hands, her little heart beating so fast it’s making her whole body shake, and he glares at the mutt. “Be cool, Luck. And quiet. Cool and quiet. You got that?”

 

Lucky’s tongue is lolling again, which is as close to a yes as Clint’s going to get, so he lets it be.

 

“Don’t worry,” he assures F.A.C., hugging her closer. Her little paws are scrabbling under the comforter, no doubt trying to get at his arm to shred it as well. “Lucky’s just a big ol’ softie. And we both now you're the real beast here. I'm sure you'll have him cowering in submission soon enough.”

 

-3-

 

Clint’s jolted out of a truly excellent dream by the kind of vibrations that he’s come to recognize as Very Not Good. He’s on his feet, palming a throwing knife from under his pillow, and pulling up flush against the wall to look over the loft railing and down into the main room of his apartment faster than he would have been able to pull on a pair of boxers, hence his nakedness as he creeps down the stairs. He absently notes that he left the A/C cranked too high again; it's way too chilly for his bits to be hanging free. But imminent threats unfortunately outrank keeping the family jewels in climate-controlled comfort.

 

There doesn’t look to be any intruders lurking about, but then, the professional kind don’t exactly stick out. He’s halfway down the steps when there’s a crash, and given that he can feel it reverberating through the floor boards, he can only imagine how loud it had to be–so, probably not professionals then.

 

He vaults the stair rail and tucks into a roll, coming up next to the breakfast counter, and finds the culprit in the kitchen. Ferocious Attack Cat (since shortened to just Cat because if it's good enough for Audrey Hepburn, who's Clint to argue?), is perched up on the shelf of the cabinet he keeps dishes in when they just so happen to be clean.

 

Funny, he doesn’t remember leaving that door open.

 

Below Cat, there’s a pile of ceramic shards, and the dirty plate he’d left on the counter by the sink the night before has little chips and dents in it where the miniaturized menace has been landing the rest of the place settings dead center.

 

On the one hand, _aww,_ a kitty after his own heart. On the other, _aw_ , Cat no.

 

She's made one hell of a mess, but he can’t just leave her up there or else she’s going to cut her paw jumping down from there eventually.

 

With a sigh, Clint backtracks to the closet off the kitchen where a whole host of cleaning supplies he never uses are stored. He unearths a broom and clears a path to the cabinet, all while Cat watches him from on high with the kind of look he can’t help but characterize as mocking.

 

Once he’s close enough, Clint scoops her up, palm cupping her belly with her legs dangling in the air so she can’t get anywhere. He twists his arm around and brings her up so they’re face-to-face and grumbles, “Behave.”

 

Cat bops his nose with her paw. But hey, at least her claws stay firmly retracted this time.

 

-4-

 

Clint's rudely awoken by something poking him. Non-stop and very insistent. With a groan, Clint blinks his eyes open hazily to face down the fluffball culprit. Lil' Shit (her name more than well-earned at this point) swipes her paw over his mouth.

 

At some point, Clint rolled off his pillow, and she's sitting smack dab in the middle of it. Aw, cat butt. He glares at her sleepily.

 

Clint's not gonna lie, he's honestly startled when Lucky moseys his way in between them, snout first and with his front half propped up over the side of the bed. Mainly because keeping the two of them in the same room has been like trying to keep Tony and Reed in the same room, but they at least usually have the motivation of something world-ending hanging over their heads.

 

"What?" he asks irritably when they both just stare at him. Rolling his eyes at himself (Like they're gonna respond? Like he could even hear 'em if they did?) he twists around so that his back is to them and tries to go back to sleep.

 

Except there's a little body crawling up over his shoulders a few seconds later, claws sticking in his t-shirt, and then Clint's rocked unceremoniously over on to his front when Lucky leaps up on the bed and crushes him down into the mattress. Lucky's getting a little too heavy these days; Kate might have a point about needing to stop slipping him pizza all the time.

 

Clint shoves Lucky off, grumbling, "Nope. This bed is for me. You both have your own. Go back there!"

 

Lil' Shit starts moving up his neck and steps onto his cheek, her paw slipping and sliding down way too close for comfort. Clint sits up and catches her when she starts to fall before he gets a claw in his eye. (Seriously, his eyes are the money-makers. Or well, his eyes and his biceps. They're more like a package deal.)

 

Lucky flops over so that his head's in Clint's lap, Lil' Shit's wiggling out of his hands in a painful attempt to climb his arm, and Clint drops his head back with a groan as he gives up on the dream of getting back to sleep any time soon.

 

-5-

 

Clint jerks awake 'cause he can't breathe. Well, he can. Kinda. But not without getting a mouthful of fur for his trouble. And that's when he registers the faint vibrations.

 

His eyes pop open and quickly adjust to the dim light filtering in from the street, his senses coming alive as he tries to pinpoint a threat without being able to hear it, and then he feels it again. On his neck.

 

And then Clint connects the rhythmic pulses with the tickling sensation right under his chin with the fur on his tongue that woke him up in the first place with the barely there whiff of leftover tuna, and all sides come up Tuna Can (named, obviously, for her recent obsession with all things tuna and _only tuna_ ).

 

Clint rolls over onto his side, scooching up on the pillow so that she's nestled down against the curve of his chest and lets the reverberations of her purrs ease him back to sleep.

 

+1+

 

Clint's lounging on the couch, watching _Dog Cops_ with the sound muted and the closed captioning on even though his aids are in because kitties and barking dogs Do Not Mix (as Lucky has unfortunately learned first hand; he looks pathetic enough with the Band-Aid on his nose that he hasn't been deemed a threat since, so at least there's that) when Phil slams into the apartment, mid-rant on the phone with someone. Coffee goes from clonked out and dreaming happy kitty dreams to scared shitless and scampering away so fast that Clint doesn't so much see her move as he feels it. Or more accurately, he feels the after effects seeing as how her claws dug in for purchase on the bit of exposed skin that'd been revealed when she'd first rucked up his t-shirt to make a napping nest.

 

Scowling and forcibly keeping himself from rubbing at the fresh scratches, Clint sits up and shoots Phil his most terrifying _I kill you_ glare. Phil quickly cuts off whoever's shouting back at him on the phone by hanging up and shrugs his shoulders, asking, "What'd I do?"

 

"She doesn't like the door," he points out scathingly. Then he thinks on it a second longer and tilts his head as he amends, "Well, the door slamming. Maybe just loud, sudden noises? I mean, it's not near as bad as her reaction to cucumbers, but apparently that's just a Cat Thing."

 

Phil's expression drops into his standard deadpan stare. "Please tell me you didn't taunt her with a cucumber."

 

"That YouTube video looked fake!" Clint's quick to his own defense even if it's not a very good one. "I was trying to make a Vine to _prove_ it was fake! For science!"

 

"That excuse only works on Stark."

 

"Whatever," Clint grumbles and leans over the side of the couch to unearth Coffee's catnip toy out from under the pile of arrows on the floor. “You’re the one that scared her, so you’re the one that gets to coax her back out. Check behind the fridge first, but guard your face. She tends to go for the eyes.”

**Author's Note:**

> The story of how Coffee came to be officially named Coffee is [over here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7181150). :)


End file.
